Mathematics and Scientific Representation

Mathematics and Scientific Representation PDF Author: Christopher Pincock
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199757100
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Mathematics plays a central role in much of contemporary science, but philosophers have struggled to understand what this role is or how significant it might be for mathematics and science. Pincock tackles this perennial question by asking how mathematics contributes to the success of our best scientific representations.

Mathematics and Scientific Representation

Mathematics and Scientific Representation PDF Author: Christopher Pincock
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199757100
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Get Book

Book Description
Mathematics plays a central role in much of contemporary science, but philosophers have struggled to understand what this role is or how significant it might be for mathematics and science. Pincock tackles this perennial question by asking how mathematics contributes to the success of our best scientific representations.

Modelling Nature: An Opinionated Introduction to Scientific Representation

Modelling Nature: An Opinionated Introduction to Scientific Representation PDF Author: Roman Frigg
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030451534
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This monograph offers a critical introduction to current theories of how scientific models represent their target systems. Representation is important because it allows scientists to study a model to discover features of reality. The authors provide a map of the conceptual landscape surrounding the issue of scientific representation, arguing that it consists of multiple intertwined problems. They provide an encyclopaedic overview of existing attempts to answer these questions, and they assess their strengths and weaknesses. The book also presents a comprehensive statement of their alternative proposal, the DEKI account of representation, which they have developed over the last few years. They show how the account works in the case of material as well as non-material models; how it accommodates the use of mathematics in scientific modelling; and how it sheds light on the relation between representation in science and art. The issue of representation has generated a sizeable literature, which has been growing fast in particular over the last decade. This makes it hard for novices to get a handle on the topic because so far there is no book-length introduction that would guide them through the discussion. Likewise, researchers may require a comprehensive review that they can refer to for critical evaluations. This book meets the needs of both groups.

Mathematics and Scientific Representation

Mathematics and Scientific Representation PDF Author: Christopher Pincock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190208570
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Mathematics plays a central role in much of contemporary science, but philosophers have struggled to understand what this role is or how significant it might be for mathematics and science. In this book Christopher Pincock tackles this perennial question in a new way by asking how mathematics contributes to the success of our best scientific representations. In the first part of the book this question is posed and sharpened using a proposal for how we can determine the content of a scientific representation. Several different sorts of contributions from mathematics are then articulated. Pincock argues that each contribution can be understood as broadly epistemic, so that what mathematics ultimately contributes to science is best connected with our scientific knowledge. In the second part of the book, Pincock critically evaluates alternative approaches to the role of mathematics in science. These include the potential benefits for scientific discovery and scientific explanation. A major focus of this part of the book is the indispensability argument for mathematical platonism. Using the results of part one, Pincock argues that this argument can at best support a weak form of realism about the truth-value of the statements of mathematics. The book concludes with a chapter on pure mathematics and the remaining options for making sense of its interpretation and epistemology. Thoroughly grounded in case studies drawn from scientific practice, this book aims to bring together current debates in both the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and to demonstrate the philosophical importance of applications of mathematics.

Scientific Representation

Scientific Representation PDF Author: James Nguyen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009007343
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the notion of scientific representation. It does so by focussing on an important class of scientific representations, namely scientific models. Models are important in the scientific process because scientists can study a model to discover features of reality. But what does it mean for something to represent something else? This is the question discussed in this Element. The authors begin by disentangling different aspects of the problem of representation and then discuss the dominant accounts in the philosophical literature: the resemblance view and inferentialism. They find them both wanting and submit that their own preferred option, the so-called DEKI account, not only eschews the problems that beset these conceptions, but further provides a comprehensive answer to the question of how scientific representation works. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures

Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures PDF Author: Patrick Suppes
Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study
ISBN: 9781575863337
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
A fundamental reason for using formal methods in the philosophy of science is the desirability of having a fixed frame of reference that may be used to organize the variety of doctrines at hand. This book—Patrick Suppes's major work, and the result of several decades of research—examines how set-theoretical methods provide such a framework, covering issues of axiomatic method, representation, invariance, probability, mechanics, and language, including research on brain-wave representations of words and sentences. This is a groundbreaking, essential text from a distinguished philosopher.

Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880–1914

Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880–1914 PDF Author: C. Jones
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230246656
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Through the prism of gender, this text explores the contrasting cultures and practice of mathematics and science and asks how they impacted on women. Claire Jones assesses nineteenth-century ideas about women's intellect, femininity and masculinity, and assesses how these attitudes shaped women's experiences as students and practitioners.

Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction

Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction PDF Author: Emily R. Grosholz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781280809743
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description


Scientific Understanding and Representation

Scientific Understanding and Representation PDF Author: Insa Lawler
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000782034
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
This volume assembles cutting-edge scholarship on scientific understanding, scientific representation, and their delicate interplay. Featuring several articles in an engaging ‘critical conversation’ format, the volume integrates discussions about understanding and representation with perennial issues in the philosophy of science, including the nature of scientific knowledge, idealizations, scientific realism, scientific inference, and scientific progress. In the philosophy of science, questions of scientific understanding and scientific representation have only recently been put in dialogue with each other. The chapters advance these discussions from a variety of fresh perspectives. They range from case studies in physics, chemistry, and neuroscience to the representational challenges of machine learning models; from special forms of representation such as maps and topological models to the relation between understanding and explanation; and from the role of idealized representations to the role of representation and understanding in scientific progress. Scientific Understanding and Representation will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics, and epistemology.

Representation Theory, Mathematical Physics, and Integrable Systems

Representation Theory, Mathematical Physics, and Integrable Systems PDF Author: Anton Alekseev
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030781488
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Over the course of his distinguished career, Nicolai Reshetikhin has made a number of groundbreaking contributions in several fields, including representation theory, integrable systems, and topology. The chapters in this volume – compiled on the occasion of his 60th birthday – are written by distinguished mathematicians and physicists and pay tribute to his many significant and lasting achievements. Covering the latest developments at the interface of noncommutative algebra, differential and algebraic geometry, and perspectives arising from physics, this volume explores topics such as the development of new and powerful knot invariants, new perspectives on enumerative geometry and string theory, and the introduction of cluster algebra and categorification techniques into a broad range of areas. Chapters will also cover novel applications of representation theory to random matrix theory, exactly solvable models in statistical mechanics, and integrable hierarchies. The recent progress in the mathematical and physicals aspects of deformation quantization and tensor categories is also addressed. Representation Theory, Mathematical Physics, and Integrable Systems will be of interest to a wide audience of mathematicians interested in these areas and the connections between them, ranging from graduate students to junior, mid-career, and senior researchers.

Introduction to Representation Theory

Introduction to Representation Theory PDF Author: Pavel I. Etingof
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 0821853511
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Very roughly speaking, representation theory studies symmetry in linear spaces. It is a beautiful mathematical subject which has many applications, ranging from number theory and combinatorics to geometry, probability theory, quantum mechanics, and quantum field theory. The goal of this book is to give a ``holistic'' introduction to representation theory, presenting it as a unified subject which studies representations of associative algebras and treating the representation theories of groups, Lie algebras, and quivers as special cases. Using this approach, the book covers a number of standard topics in the representation theories of these structures. Theoretical material in the book is supplemented by many problems and exercises which touch upon a lot of additional topics; the more difficult exercises are provided with hints. The book is designed as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. It should be accessible to students with a strong background in linear algebra and a basic knowledge of abstract algebra.